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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Ghia

I've been feeling kind of uninspired by all three of my current knitting WIPs for the last couple weeks, but almost finishing the skirt the other day lit a fire under me to get back to my Geno sweater, which I've renamed Ghia. As I explained on my project page, in my family there's a Gino, a Tino and a Nino - but this is a very feminine sweater, so I gave it my family nickname, Ghia. And yes, we're Italian!

I'd finished the back about a week and a half ago, but was procrastinating about the fronts. The pattern is a 26-row repeat, and not very easy to memorize for me. But I've finished the first repeat, and I think it's lovely:

I've read that there are some problems with the chart for the right front. This is the left front. You really have to pay attention here: there's just one chart for all the sizes, so the lace pattern isn't centered. I'm making the smallest size and in some places, the first stitch is a yarn over. In order to neaten up the edge for sewing later, I cast on an extra stitch at the side seam edge and am working this as a garter stitch selvedge.

As I usually do, I lined up a sticky note at the edge of my size so that I'm not distracted by stitches from the other sizes. One of the tricky things about this pattern is that the yarn overs at the side edge are not always "balanced" by a decrease, so if you're not careful the stitch count can easily grow. To remind me of places where I need to decrease an extra stitch to avoid this, I highlighted the yarn overs that are unbalanced. Of course I made a mistake and highlighted one that is balanced, so I still have to pay close attention, LOL!

I put down my other sweater a few weeks ago after knitting the whole back and deciding it was too small, then ripping it out and starting over. At that point the weather was warming up. But now we're below freezing again! March, why you gotta do me like that?!

22 comments:

Your Ghia sweater looks as if it's going to be very pretty. It's a very similar lace pattern to the one I'm doing in the sweater I'm currently knitting... mine is just a single repeat of the lace up the centre front and centre back though, so no shaping within the lace required!

You truly never cease to impress and amaze me. Your patience is astounding. I love how your Ghia is coming along ... what a lovely color and the stitch pattern is super interesting. As for March, bah! I could not believe the snow that we had last night.

I did a knit along last year of the Miette sweater. If you look at the category cloud at right, it's tagged Miette knitalong. It was a lot of work! I might consider doing something easy though, if people found it helpful :-)

In a nutshell:

I started this blog with no clear idea of what the content would be, but rather as a place to compile my thoughts. Turns out, what I mostly think about is knitting, sewing and nail polish. I'm Yellowbird on Ravelry.